Related to this is my constant compulsion to reconsider things - originally, authentically, from the beginning - that is, in an unmediated dialogue with this god of mine; I refuse to simplify matters by referring to some respected, more material authority, even if it were the holy writ itself. (I accept the Gospel of Jesus as a challenge to go my own way.) When it gets right down to it, I am a child of the age of conceptual, rather than mystical, thought and therefore my god as well - if I am compelled to speak of him (which I do very unwillingly) - must appear as something terribly abstract, vague and unattractive (all the more so since my relationship to him is so difficult to pin down). But it appears so only to someone I try to tell about him - the experience itself is quite vivid, immediate and particular, perhaps (thanks to its constantly astonishing diversity) more lively than for someone whose "normal" God is provided with all the appropriate attributes (which oddly enough can alienate more often than drawing one closer). And something else that is typical of my god: he is a master of waiting, and in doing so he frequently unnerves me. It is as thought he set up various possibilities around me and then waited silently to see what I would do. If I fail, he punishes me, and of course he uses me as the agent of my own punishment (pangs of conscience, for example); if I don't fail, he rewards me (through my own relief and joy) - and frequently, he leaves me in uncertainty. (By the way, when my conscience bothers me, why does it bother me? And when I rejoice, why do I rejoice? Is it not again because of him?) His last judgment is taking place now, continuously, always - and yet is always the last: nothing that has happened can ever un-happen, everything remains in the "memory of Being" - and I too remain there - condemned to be with myself till the end of time - just as I am and just as I make myself.
But I began with something quite different: with the question of whether it all had a meaning. That I can only find the final answer within myself does not mean, of course, that I'm not interested in what the "external world" thinks of it, or that this external world does not interest me. After all, I live in it, it shapes my possibilities, my own alternatives in life are structured from its materials and it is only through the world that I relate to that "higher" horizon.
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
I find his account of his personal relationship to the divine not so very different from mine - a useful data point to extrapolate from. His final point brings to mind D&C 84:46. What does the phrase "through the world" mean?
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